Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do.
Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.
But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.
Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
